Motorola’s new HD phone, pure and simple

The Motorola RAZR HD has not done much at all elegantly and brilliantly.

John DAVIDSON

There’s a lot to be said for a phone that just does one or two things really, really well.

Or, in the case of the $720 Motorola RAZR HD phone that’s the subject of this week’s review, there’s a lot to be said for a phone that specialises in not doing one or two things really well.

What the Motorola RAZR HD is really, really good at is not sitting on a charger. It cannot sit on a charger for two days and one night at a time. There aren’t too many other phones that can not do that, and we know of no other 4G phones that don’t do it as well as the Motorola RAZR HD doesn’t do it. Sit on a charger, I mean.

When it comes to not sitting on a charger, the RAZR is the absolute bee’s knees.

Also, the RAZR HD is very, very good at not being chintzy. It’s not the bee’s knees at not being chintzy – of the current crop of phones, the most not chintzy phone would be the iPhone 5 – but it’s definitely up there with the rest of the non-starters in the chintzy stakes, and it’s certainly better at not being chintzy than its most immediate and formidable rival, the Samsung Galaxy S III 4G.

So that’s two things the Motorola RAZR HD doesn’t do really well, and honestly, that’s enough. It could not do nothing else, and it would still be worth owning.

Back in the bad old days, when Motorola was struggling to do anything significant in the smartphone business, it did what a lot of Android phone makers do to differentiate themselves from their competitors: it did more.

It added more bells, more whistles to an Android platform already heavy with as many bells and whistles as most people knew how to ring and blow. Most visibly, it added a layer of social networking software on top of Android’s social networking, a layer which I, after having initially been captivated by its more-ness, ultimately struggled to make any use of whatsoever.

But it seems we may now be back in the good old days. Motorola has been acquired by Google, which owns the Android platform, and with the RAZR HD, as well as with its other new phone, the RAZR M, Motorola seems intent on getting out of the way of Android (which may be on the verge of buckling under its own bells and whistles anyway) and not doing very much at all.

And, frankly, it’s not done much at all elegantly and brilliantly. The phone only has two small buttons, for instance – one for power and one for volume – but they’re metal buttons etched with grooves and bumps that lend a lovely, tactile feel to them.

It’s a simple thing, but it makes the buttons easier to find and a pleasure to use. Likewise the big “Circles” widget on the home screen, which gives you a simple, quick view of incoming messages, battery life and weather – one of the few user interface enhancements that Motorola has made to this otherwise fairly unadulterated Android phone.

The battery life is by far the best of the simple enhancements, though. Motorola has used a 2530 mAh battery, a good deal bigger than, say, the 2100 mAh battery in the Samsung Galaxy S III 4G. Coupled with some special battery-saving software Motorola has hidden in the phone, it gives the RAZR HD an advertised talk time of a whopping 16 hours, double the industry average for smartphones, and double what Apple advertises for the iPhone 5.

I’m not such a big talker that I can tell you whether Motorola’s talk time is accurate, but I can tell you that as far as general smartphone usage goes, the phone’s battery life blows away anything we’ve reviewed before.

I took the phone away with me on a trip to Melbourne over the weekend, and at the end of its first day of moderately heavy usage, the RAZR HD still reported its battery was 60 per cent full. That’s taking the phone off its charger at 8 o’clock Friday morning, using Google Maps GPS navigation very often that day, using its new Chrome browser very often, and making the occasional call, right up until midnight Friday, at which time the battery meter on the home screen reported that 60 per cent figure.

The next morning, Saturday, the phone still had a 55 per cent charge – it must have some very good smarts for minimising battery usage overnight – and it wasn’t until 6pm on that second day of moderately heavy usage that the phone hit the critical 5 per cent mark. I charged the phone Saturday night. It’s now lunch time on Monday, and the meter still reads 47 per cent full.

Depending on how much you use it, you could conceivably get two days’ usage out of a single charge. Motorola’s claim that you’ll get one full day of usage is easily true, with a wide margin of error.

And keep in mind, all this is on Telstra’s LTE network, which offers lightning fast internet speeds but which typically kills mobile phone batteries dead, often in much less than a single day.

Naturally, such a long battery life does come with a cost: the RAZR’s screen isn’t quite as large as those of some of its competitors, and the processor is only dual core where some competitors phones are quad core. But sometimes less is more. Sometimes, it’s the thing not done that’s the most of all things.

The Australian Financial Review

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.